The Cutthroat Read online

  “I didn’t burn that bridge, and I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve had no luck putting a four-reeler together on my own. Jekyll and Hyde is the best shot I’ve had since.”

  “I won’t put you in danger.”

  “I won’t let go of this opportunity. I’m sure nothing will happen to me.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s not good enough.”

  “But I know, I just can’t put it in words.”

  Bell said, “Why don’t we sleep on it? Talk it over in the morning.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “You’re not? Neither am I.”

  Reckless? the Cutthroat asked again.

  The theater train, a limited-stops express that ran on the suburban commuter line, pulled out of Union Station at ten minutes to midnight. Forty minutes to Tuxedo Park. Forty minutes to decide.

  Reckless?

  Maybe I was in my younger years.

  Undisciplined?

  Do you take me for a fool? Discipline is second nature now, my sturdy watchman, ever-vigilant, acutely observant.

  He had sharpened the instincts he had been born with. He had grown so sharp at gauging menace, so skilled at covering his tracks, that the odds of getting captured had long ago shifted in his favor.

  Reckless? It would be impossible to be reckless. And he had the advantage tonight of operating on familiar territory, for to his eye the Midwestern cities were all similar, with the theaters short train rides from the wealthy suburbs. Cincinnati was the first place he settled after sailing from England on an ancient “half clipper” cotton ship. It was returning empty to New Orleans. The other passengers joked that they were carried as ballast, but her captain was pocketing the ticket money and could care less about his name or whether he owned a passport or landed in New Orleans disguised as a sailor.

  A showboat—a theater on a Mississippi River barge—brought him to Cincinnati, where he met a woman with money. After she died, the yellow cottage on the river had been his to visit intermittently for nearly twenty years.

  He knew the territory. The theater train carried a gay crowd of mostly younger people who could afford to sleep late the next morning. That they all knew each other—Tuxedo Park being a town of prosperous businesses that benefitted from proximity to its powerhouse neighbor on the Mississippi River—made it even riskier as he would have to pry her loose from the clods vying for her attention.

  I know the risk.

  He took a seat at the back of the car a couple of rows behind her and imagined the opening sequences of the drama. It started with a curtain-raiser on a quiet suburban pavement that was darkened by the spring-budding trees filtering the streetlamps. She would say something like, “You look familiar.”

  And they would start to walk down tree-lined streets that grow increasingly dim and narrow.

  “Would you tell me your name, miss?”

  They were turning into a lane when the curtain crashed down.

  The imagined encounter evaporated. A man, who had entered the car from the vestibule behind him, leaned close and whispered,

  “I know who you are. You thought you could evade me. I want my credit.”

  40

  The Cutthroat caught a glimpse of long, stringy hair.

  He stood up, brushed past Rick Cox, and whispered, “Follow me.”

  He pushed through the vestibule door onto the open platform between the cars. Cox caught up with him in the near darkness. Faces lit only by the glow from the cars ahead and behind, ears half deafened by the thunder of the engine and the wheels clattering on track joints, they stared at each other. Cox’s weirdly mobile features reflected a dozen questions. He blurted one.

  “Why are you wearing a false beard?” Cox glanced back at the car at the gay crowd in the bright lights and for a second, the Cutthroat saw, he fixed on the petite blonde with the musical voice. It all dawned on the lunatic in a flash. “Oh . . . No . . . You!”

  He reached to tug the Cutthroat’s beard.

  The Cutthroat blocked him with his cane. As he did, he twisted the head, yanked out the blade, and rammed it deep into Cox’s belly. He had murdered many, many more women than men. But their internal anatomy was the same, at least when it came to organs that mattered. He gripped his weapon with both hands and used all his might to drag it up through the sternum.

  He checked that no one was coming from either car. Then he stepped over the side chains, pulled the body under them, leaned out into the slipstream and held on with one hand while he pulled Cox with the other. Calling on almost superhuman strength, he lifted Cox’s body beside him, swung it high and far, and yanked it in from the arc of the swing and under the wheels.

  You are brilliant.

  The lunatic hurled himself under a speeding train.

  Brilliant.

  He retrieved the cane he had dropped, sheathed his blade, and waited outside in the vestibule while the train slowed for Tuxedo Park. The passengers hurried out of the car. He followed them from the lavish stone station, wrapping his cape tightly closed to cover the blood that soaked his coat and trousers. Ahead, he could hear the blonde laughing with her friends, escaping him again.

  Leaving him still hungry.

  “Isaac!” Marion said in the night.

  Bell came awake in an instant, reaching under the pillow, eyes glittering like cobalt. She had turned on a light.

  “I know why I know the Cutthroat won’t hurt me if he is in the Jekyll and Hyde company.”

  Bell let go of the gun, sat up, and put an arm around her shoulder. “Tell me.”

  “You think it’s highly likely that the Cutthroat is in the Jekyll and Hyde company.”

  “Likely enough to make it too dangerous.”

  “He won’t hurt me. He can’t hurt me. Because if he wants to have the movie made, he needs me alive.”

  Isaac Bell broke into a broad smile.

  “Are you laughing at me?” she asked.

  “No. I am, as always, grateful for your wisdom. But this time even you don’t fully understand what you’ve reckoned.”

  “I told you, you don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Thanks to you, I don’t have to worry about anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve come up with the ideal way to distract him. If the Cutthroat is Barrett or Buchanan or Henry Young, he won’t hurt anyone because he won’t risk getting caught until after you finish the movie in Los Angeles. That gives me the entire tour across the West to nail him before he murders another woman.”

  41

  “Immortality, Mr. Bell?”

  Barrett and Buchanan eyed Isaac Bell skeptically over their coffee cups. Their train had just crossed the Missouri–Kansas line and was passing through oil fields littered with abandoned derricks.

  “Next, you’ll sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “On top of Treasure Island.”

  The tall detective found no humor in their banter. Not when he knew that these men were two of his three suspects. The odds were, one of them had slaughtered Anna Waterbury and Lillian Lent and Mary Beth Winthrop and how many more girls who had died in terror.

  “A movie will make your performances live forever.”

  “We weren’t aware you were involved with motion pictures, Mr. Bell.”

  “My wife is a filmmaker. Marion Morgan Bell.”

  Both actors’ eyebrows shot upward. Buchanan said, “You are married to Marion Morgan? She made The Iron Horse. You saw it, Jackson, about the western railroads.”

  Barrett was studying Bell closely. “So you are not a complete stranger to show business, Mr. Bell.”

  “I believe I can persuade her to immortalize your production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a big film. Three full reels. Maybe four.”

  John Buchanan shook his head. “Absolutely not. If the
audience can watch a movie, why would they come to our show?”

  “They can read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But they still come to your show.”

  “Interesting,” Barrett said. “It is something to consider.”

  “Someday in the future,” Buchanan added vaguely.

  Bell said, “You would have to do it immediately after your last performance in San Francisco. It can be made fast and inexpensively only while your company is still together, your scenery and costumes intact.”

  “Who will pay for it?” asked Buchanan. “You’re talking about carrying the entire company during the process, not to mention what cameras and that sort of thing cost.”

  “My syndicate will put up the money in exchange for half the profits. Your movie rights to your play will keep the other half.”

  “This will take some pondering.”

  “Why?” asked Bell. “It was your idea.”

  “Our idea? What are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Barrett, you said you wished your play would not disappear. And, Mr. Buchanan, you wished you could sell tickets to a production that cost nothing to make. Didn’t you?”

  “Wishes.”

  “I’m offering you your wishes. If you must ponder, ponder two unique facts about movies. One, a movie preserves your play—and, particularly, your performances—for the ages.”

  Barrett nodded.

  Buchanan said, “Yes, yes, immortality. There’s where you started. What is the other unique fact?”

  “An all-new kind of ‘magic wand’ profit never seen before in the history of the theater. Speaking in round numbers, let’s say your play wraps eight thousand a week, provided you crowd the theater. But your play costs you seven thousand a week in salaries and expenses. Each and every week, whether or not you crowd the theater.”

  Bell watched Barrett and Buchanan exchange raised eyebrows, again. The Hartford insurance man had learned a thing or two.

  “To make your movie will cost you nothing. When it plays in every movie house in the country, it will bring in twenty, thirty, fifty thousand a week. Every week. While your cost every week will remain zero.”

  “I like that,” said Buchanan.

  “Money and immortality,” said Barrett. “Very tempting, Mr. Bell.”

  “Your idea, gentlemen. All I did was listen to you. But speed is of the essence, unless you’re willing to go to the expense of starting from scratch with a whole new company, scenery, and costumes.”

  Barrett and Buchanan looked at each other and traded silent nods.

  “What’s the next step?”

  Isaac Bell stood up. “We shake on it, and then I will do everything in my power to talk my wife into it.”

  “If she won’t,” said Barrett, “we’ll find someone else.”

  Bell jumped at the chance to make Marion bulletproof.

  “That won’t be necessary. We have already discussed it.”

  “Was talking her into it a negotiating ploy?”

  “Guilty,” said Bell. “It’s a terrible insurance man habit. The customer wants his steel mills insured for the lowest premium. I sympathize but must ‘clear it with my underwriters,’ who are real skinflints. Fact is, there’s really no one else to film your play better than Marion, and she is so excited about moving it out of doors, beyond the confines of the stage. When Mr. Hyde stalks a girl through the storm in Central Park, she will fashion a wind machine to buffet the trees. And you will fight your Dream Duel in a hurricane.”

  “I, for one, will send my understudy,” said Buchanan.

  “Me, too,” Barrett grinned. “Poor Mr. Young will have his hands full standing in for both of us.”

  “Is Mr. Young a fencer, too?” asked Bell.

  “Enough of one to spell us on occasion.”

  Barrett said, “But, seriously, if for some reason your wife can’t—”

  Isaac Bell answered firmly, “If Marion Morgan Bell can’t make the movie, we won’t pay for it. And we won’t release the rights.”

  “Then it will behoove us to be most persuasive. When can we meet her?”

  “Soon as we get to Denver. Let’s say lunch tomorrow at the Brown Palace, if we can round up Miss Cook and your stage manager.”

  “Henry Young is not a principal.”

  “My wife will have questions of a technical nature best addressed to the stage manager.”

  42

  The Cutthroat dreamed he was a boy in London.

  The boy found a broken sword. He polished the rust with sand and honed both edges like a Roman gladius. He stole a file and shaped the broken end to a needle point.

  He dreamed they chased him through narrow streets.

  He fled to a seaport that reeked of salt and grease and smoke.

  He sprawled, seasick, retching his guts out on a splintered deck. The ship finally stopped moving in a hot Southern city where the girls spoke French.

  He killed them and fled up the Mississippi River on a steamboat. No—the dream went backwards and started over. The steamboat was behind him. He was on an immense raft, a floating theater, pushed by a steamboat. Up the wide, wide river from New Orleans, day and night, day and night, day and night, Memphis, past Cairo, up the Ohio River. Off the raft at Louisville, on again, and up the river, and off at Cincinnati. Safe at last.

  Suddenly he was an animal sleeping in his den.

  He was a wolf. Something paced at the mouth of the cave.

  He opened his eyes.

  He lay still, adrenaline overflowing his arteries, heart thundering, every sense aware.

  His dream wolf had felt a presence.

  He steadied his breath and stilled his heart. What did it mean?

  Eighty men and women were sleeping on the train. This late at night, the only sounds he heard were mechanical—the huff of switch engines, wheels grinding on rails, the muffled clash of couplers, the hoot-hoot of engine signals, the clank of bells, the urgent hiss of locomotives bleeding steam, and the long, long whistle of a train leaving for the West—this train, this special bound for Denver—rumbling out of the yards, thumping through switches, then smooth on the main line, swaying as it picked up speed, whistle howling, drive wheels thundering.

  What had his instincts latched onto? What had he noticed? It was there, almost beside him, something close, which he could not quite touch yet. He had to let his mind drift . . . The broken sword had started his dream. He remembered it well. He had found it when the tide exposed the muddy Thames bank. It took an edge beautifully. A razor’s edge. It was eventually too light, for he had taken on size and developed hard muscle as he grew older. The double-edged Roman short sword was a better fit, and he had used a variety of them—gladius, the longer spatha, the short puglio dagger—choosing one over the other on whim, enjoying one or the other, before moving on to thinner, whippier blades he could hide in a cane.

  He sat up in bed, his mind clamoring.

  Change plagued touring companies. Every imaginable mishap felled actors. They got sick. They got drunk. They got pregnant. They couldn’t remember lines anymore. They were arrested for debt, locked up for bigamy. They married. They divorced. They even got homesick. Or they simply vanished. But whatever the mishap, the company had to replace them, and backstage people, too—carpenters, riggers, electricians, wardrobe. So regular turnover was typical of a road show. But he could not recall as many new faces as he saw in the Jekyll and Hyde company—all at once, back in Cincinnati.

  Two actors: the new Mr. Pool, Archibald Abbott; the new maid, Helen Mills; a replacement stagehand named Quinn, just hired away from Jimmy Valentine. Then there was the newspaper reporter who had talked his way into the publicist’s good graces, Scudder Smith; and the Hartford angel, Isaac Bell; and now Bell’s wife, Marion Morgan Bell, who had looked familiar, though they had never met before the movie meeting the day before.


  The wolf of my dream knows that his den has been invaded.

  I am no longer safe when I sleep.

  ACT FOUR

  HOLLYWOOD

  43

  DENVER

  Rumor ricocheted the length of the Jekyll & Hyde Special.

  They were steaming on the High Plains, and from the locomotive to Isaac Bell’s private car and back again. Scrambled in the crowded Pullman dormitory cars, and simultaneously denied and amplified in the dining car, guesses, gossip and speculation, confused players, stagehands, carpenters, electricians, clerks, publicists, advance men, and musicians, and set all on edge.

  Mr. Barrett and Mr. Buchanan had had a huge blowup.

  Bigger, much bigger, than their usual rows.

  The Jekyll and Hyde tour was canceled.

  Because the crazy writer killed himself? Cox. They found him in the suburbs.

  The tour would be speeded up.

  They would skip Denver . . . But what a great theater town.

  The tour was extended to include Los Angeles.

  The tour was canceled.

  Barrett and Buchanan had had a terrible fistfight.

  Mr. Young had tried to stop it. The poor stage manager had to throw himself between them. The reward for his pains? He had been beaten bloody. The sight of Mr. Young drinking coffee in the dining car without a mark on him only added to the confusion.

  Harry Warren thought the stage manager looked almost happy, not his usual appearance. He offered a smoke from a pack of Young’s favorite Turkish tobacco, Murads.

  “Bless you, Quinn.”

  The twitch in Young’s cheek that the regular stagehands said always jumped like a frog on closing days and opening days—when every stick of scenery and every stitch of costume had to be loaded onto the train the second the curtain came down—was barely pulsing.

  They lit up. Warren said, “I overheard the boys saying you stand in for Barrett and Buchanan.”